Reflections by award-winning maritime historian Joan Druett, author of many books about the sea

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Wednesday, February 8, 2017

Doomsday is closer

Lawrence Krauss (L), chairman of the "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists"
Board of Sponsors, and board member Thomas Pickering (R), a former US
Under Secretary of State as well as US Ambassador to the United Nations,
Russia and other countries, unveil that the board has moved the minute
hand of their "Doomsday Clock" by 30 seconds to a more ominous 2-1/2
minutes from midnight.

The world is definitely scared.

It is now two and a half minutes to apocalypse.

The group behind the famed Doomsday Clock announced at a news
conference that it was adjusting the countdown to the End of it All by
moving the hands 30 seconds closer to midnight - the closest the clock
has been to Doomsday since 1953, after the United States tested its
first thermonuclear device, followed months later by the Soviet Union's
hydrogen bomb test.

In announcing that the Doomsday Clock was
moving 30 seconds closer to the end of humanity, the group noted that in
2016, "the global security landscape darkened as the international
community failed to come effectively to grips with humanity's most
pressing existential threats, nuclear weapons and climate change."

"Making matters worse, the United States now has a president who has
promised to impede progress on both of those fronts," theoretical
physicist Lawrence M Krauss and retired Rear Admiral David Titley wrote
in a New York Times op-ed on behalf of the Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientist.

"Never before has the Bulletin decided to advance the
clock largely because of the statements of a single person. But when
that person is the new president of the United States, his words
matter."

The clock is symbolic, sitting at the intersection of art
and science, and it has wavered between two minutes and 17 minutes til
doom since its inception in 1947. A board of scientists and nuclear
experts meets regularly to determine what time it is on the Doomsday
Clock.